RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  What kept hurting my eyes was that auto carcass. The four of them were living in that thing. What few of their belongings they’d saved were stashed in the lidless trunk, and they slept inside, or underneath, or nearby, maybe on top, whatever worked. No tipi-dwelling Indian was ever as poor as my family. As Senior explained things to us, his tone was craven and his smile was fawning.

  I cast my eyes down and tried to keep my stomach calm. The car said everything. It was the first car anyone in my family ever owned. Had no tires, wheels, fenders, windshield, windows, trunk lid, headlights, taillights, or license, but it was a car. Was once.

  I walked off into the evening a bit and hunkered down. Then I walked back, looked Senior in the eye, reached in his shirt pocket, slipped out the pack of Marlboros and took one, and his matches. My first cigarette. I walked away and squatted down again and put my anger into the hard scratch of the match head and the first pull into my lungs. I held the match at arm’s length and watched it burn. The flame died just before it touched my fingers.

  I’d been carrying the embers of anger inside me for a while. At Sun Dance earlier that summer, Angelee was sporting a bruise like a pint-size eggplant around her left eye. “Where did you get that?” I said.

  She snuffled and hid her face.

  “Tell me Senior didn’t put it there,” I demanded.

  She flung a wild look at me and hurried away, sobbing.

  I didn’t need to ask if he was sober at the time.

  That’s when I started calling him Senior instead of Dad.

  I stubbed out the cigarette on the hard, dry ground. I stared at the dry hills all around me. My anger could have set them on fire.

  One good thing about anger, it keeps you from knowing how scared you are.

  When I walked back to the family, Mom pulled me down beside her, and my heart sank.

  “I’m taking Angelee and Mayana to Wambli,” Mom said to me softly.

  Her words leapt at my throat.

  Wambli was where her family came from, over east toward Rosebud.

  “I’m going to Martin to look for work,” said Senior.

  I raised my eyes into his, not caring about respect, not feeling any, and wanting him to know it.

  “Tomorrow,” said Senior. “We’re all leaving tomorrow.”

  Which meant they’d planned to leave without letting us know.

  I stood up, unsteady. “Grandpa, I want to go home,” I squeezed out.

  He looked at me and his eyes were hard as rocks. Though he was a kind man, he could be hard. “The school will board you,” he said.

  Watch out, be good, or the white man will come and take you away!

  So that’s how it went. Grandpa and I spent the night under the wagon in case it rained, the last time I would see him for the longest month of my life. Unchee, Angelee, and Mayana got the wagon bed, Senior and Mom the front and back seat. In the middle of the night I woke up. Probably, until then, I’d never wakened in the middle of the night in my short life. I felt odd, out of sorts, itchy. Little sparks ran up and down my arms, like flicks of electricity. I looked up at the black bottom of the wagon, and suddenly couldn’t stand being penned in.

  I rolled out. The sky was brightened by a half-moon, the this-or-that-way moon. The hills around caught the moonlight and held it. The grasses glowed softly, and even the parched earth of August looked gentle, inviting, and beckoning. My legs felt jumpy. I could take off. I knew that. I could take off. There would be spot work on the ranches—it was haying season, and beet harvest time. Maybe I could hook up with someone and do the Indian rodeo circuit, which attracted me. Maybe I could improve my hoop dancing and do the competitions on the powwow circuit. People did make a living that way. My legs were jumping, saying “Go, go, go!”

  I turned and looked at the wagon. The women were out of sight behind the sides, and Grandpa was invisible underneath. I looked at the car. Somehow a glance of moonlight hit part of the front seat just so, the driver’s side. My father’s head, upper chest, and arm were caught in the light. The arm was crooked against the steering wheel in a way that looked uncomfortable, and the head propped against the door at an awkward angle. It looked to me like his neck was broken. My lungs and belly felt a breath of fire.

  I stood there in the moonlight a long time. Finally I crawled back under the wagon. Nowhere else to go.

  In the morning, without breakfast, they caught a ride to Wambli. Senior went along, intending to thumb to Martin from there. Martin is a white-man town between the reservations. I told myself that this time he would really look for ranch work, that he wouldn’t just booze everything away, that he would put together some money, go get my mother and sisters, and make them a family again.

  But I knew the real story, past, present, and future. The story of booze doesn’t change.

  I didn’t have much time to think about it. “I have something to give you,” Unchee said. She looked at me, and it seemed like she was there with us, not off in her own world. I felt … hopeful.

  From underneath the wagon seat she took a long, hide-wrapped something. Grandpa stood to the side and looked on.

  Had I not been in a funk, I would have been thrilled. I knew what it was.

  Unchee set the package on the seat and unfolded the deer hide. There lay a Pipe bag, elaborately beaded. “Open it,” she said.

  Reverently, I took out the Pipe within. The bowl was an L shape of pipestone, which you call catlinite, with four parallel rings carved in the upright part, representing the four directions, and lead inlaid in the rings. The stem was of water birch, decorated with brass tacks, and near the mouth part, tight beadwork with tiny beads. Tied to it with red ribbon was sage. Though the Pipe had the look of something a hundred years old or more, the sage was fresh. I looked at Unchee and thought, You have been changing the sage regularly all these years. Her face was unreadable.

  This was the long stem of an important man. If you were going to carry such a Pipe, you need to be working for the people. Correction, if I was going to carry this Pipe, I needed to work for the people.

  I touched both stem and bowl gently. The bowl of a Pipe is of stone, and it represents Earth. The stem is wooden, and represents all that grows upon Earth. The Pipe is the center of the Lakota way, and has been since White Buffalo Woman brought it to us long before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men.

  Grandpa looked uneasily at Unchee, back at me, back at Unchee. Finally he said, “This Pipe belonged to Unchee’s father. She wants you to have it. When the time comes for you to carry a Pipe, you may carry this one. In the meantime, take care of it.”

  No, I was not a Pipe carrier—not old enough. I wanted to be. And I wanted to go on the mountain and get a vision that would guide my life.

  I put the bowl and stem in the Pipe bag and wrapped them both in the deer hide. O yes I will take care of it. I looked around at the dusty, nowhere town. I made a point of not tearing up. It is my connection to you, and to being Indian.

  “I have something else to give you,” said Unchee.

  I waited respectfully.

  “You will not understand yet, but it’s important. From this day take a new last name—Blue Crow.”

  I felt conked on the head.

  Unchee waited.

  “I take the last name Blue Crow,” I said respectfully, but I felt confused.

  “So today we enroll you in school as Joseph Blue Crow.”

  Right away they took me to the boarding school. It was a Saturday, but we walked through the half-dark corridors, hoping to find someone. A white man with white hair and a sweet face, kind of like that guy Dave in the Wendy’s commercials on TV, he was working in the main office, said he was the principal, Mr. King. (These days employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are mostly Indians, but not in 1967.) He asked some questions about who my family was, where I’d been living, and what my schooling was. Unchee had to answer, on account of she had the only English. Mr. King did a double-take when she said I hadn�
�t been to school, and a triple-take when she said I didn’t speak any English. She treated him the way she treated all white people, like he was a worm. I didn’t know what it was she had extra special against the whites, not yet I didn’t.

  Nevertheless, Mr. King enrolled me, said I could go home for Christmas. Christmas! my mind screamed. I couldn’t go that long with seeing Grandpa and Unchee—it was months away. Besides, it wasn’t any holiday of ours. “I’ll come to see you at the half-moon,” said Grandpa to me softly. Mr. King scowled at hearing words in Lakota, though he didn’t know what they meant.

  “This is a BIA school,” said Mr. King. “That means it’s free, devoted to helping Indian children make better lives for themselves.” (When Unchee translated that word “children,” she put a little stress on it, underlining the implication.) “We’re not like Red Cloud Indian School,” which was near Pine Ridge, “or St. Francis,” southwest of Rosebud, both run by Jesuits. “Kyle is a U.S. government school and promotes no religion.” He emphasized the last phrase with a smile.

  “No religion?” Grandpa asked through Unchee. His tone was surprised.

  Unchee and Mr. King back and forthed a little. “No particular brand of the Christian religion,” she summarized to Grandpa. She added her opinion. “It’s better to get an education without the white-man religion.”

  Grandpa eyed her and said, “Both religious and secular are basically an attempt to nub the red out, so it doesn’t make much difference.”

  Silently, I agreed with Grandpa.

  Mr. King stood, came around his desk, and stood next to me, sort of like saying we’d talked among ourselves enough. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said. That was the first of a thousand lies. “You’ve made the best decision.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, and I knew I was trapped. A schoolboy for the first time in my life. Not a student for the first time—my whole life was learning—but a schoolboy. My skin jumped under his touch.

  Because Mr. King looked like Dave Thomas, to this day I can’t go into a Wendy’s.

  Grandpa and Unchee got an early start home. They’d shared the last of their food with the family, had no money, and would go hungry until they got back to the place on Medicine Root Creek.

  We walked outside, the four of us. Kyle didn’t look like much those days, no handsome Little Wound School, no college, not even a Wild Horse Cafe. Kyle was just a few houses, a place to get gas, and two general stores. Except for the school it wouldn’t have been a town at all. The school was a red brick affair, unimportant-looking.

  I don’t remember ever being so scared as when I watched Grandpa flick the lines at the horse, and the wagon pulled the two of them away, their backs toward me.

  “Everything is going to be fine,” said Mr. King beside me, patting my shoulder to reinforce the lie.

  School Days

  I am going to take no truck from you about what Indian schools are like. BIA schools, church schools, it makes no difference. The lie is that they’re charitable institutions, established to help Lo, the poor Indian. The fact is that of all the white man’s gifts, they are the most insidious.

  First, let’s get clear about the purpose. Someone said, You can’t Christianize an Indian until you civilize him. (That’s absolutely true, and I am doing my best to avoid both.) So what they do at boarding schools is try to beat the red out of us, and the white in.

  For more than a century Indian children of every tribe have been shipped to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania and other boarding schools, on and off the reservations. When the children left home, they and their families wept openly at the train stations. Indian families aren’t used to being separated. We don’t send children to schoolrooms or daycare centers. They go everywhere with their parents and do everything. This is considered a vital part of their growing up.

  So when Indian kids were taken away to boarding schools in the old days, they were acutely lonely. Often they didn’t go home at all during the school year, not even at Christmas. Sometimes they didn’t see their parents for years. This isolation was the worst thing boarding schools imposed on Indian children. Many of them committed suicide.

  At boarding school they learned English, they learned to be white. They got punished for speaking their own language. They got punished for singing the songs they grew up with, even the lullabies. They got punished for being Indian.

  On the Lakota Sioux reservations in my day you went to school or else. If you tried to stay away, a cop would come and take you—a truant officer or a BIA policeman, and either one might be Indian, for all that meant. We thought school was worse than any of the white man’s inventions, even jail, because it was inflicted on children, and pretended to be kindly.

  The Kyle School was run on military lines. Roll call at start and end of day. Stand at attention. March in step. If you disobeyed, corporal punishment. Simple as that, just like Catholic schools. One advantage I will admit to a BIA school. Since we didn’t have priests, we didn’t have pederasts.

  The first day of class was the most humiliating day of my life. I was fourteen years old, already over six feet tall, yet I was in first grade. A kid half my age showed me the way to the boys’ room. I was looking to go outside, because I didn’t know what the sign on that door meant in English. He showed me how to use the toilet, and the sink.

  The teacher, Mr. Banks, didn’t speak Lakota, so he taught us English by pointing at pictures and saying the words. Picture of bovine with bag. “Cow.” Picture of bovine with tool box. “Bull.” Picture of prairie. “Grass.” If I’d known more English, at least I could have added that up to “bullshit.”

  I was punished twice that first year for speaking Lakota. The first time I was forced to kneel on two-by-fours for hours, and that hurts. The second time I was hung up by my thumbs from water pipes. The only way I could relieve the pressure on my thumbs was to stand on my high tiptoes, and you can’t last long at that. My body ached terrible when they let me down—I can’t remember it aching like that, ever. Mr. King said it would teach me. It did. Taught me not to speak Lakota where adults could hear me, not even Indian adults, because they would sometimes turn you in.

  I had my hands whacked by yardsticks. Once Emile was whacked by a yardstick with brass studs. (He was lucky they never found out he liked other boys—they’d have thought up a really nasty punishment for that.) I was made to stand in the corner nose and knees touching the walls. They deloused me by force. They cut my hair by force, and it had never been touched.

  None of that was the worst. What I hated was losing my freedom. At home I would roam around every day. If I wanted, I would ride, or work with one of the horses, teaching it to stand ground-tied, or back up. Or I would straighten and fletch arrows—I loved to shoot. Or hunt. Or roam and gather sage, cedar, willow bark, or bearberry. Whatever I wanted.

  At school I had to do what Mr. Banks said. Sit in a hard chair at a desk for hours. Ask permission to go to the bathroom. Eat on schedule. Work on schedule (it was our job to keep the school clean). Go to bed at lights out, get up when ordered, do roll call, stand in line for oatmeal, and so on and so on.

  Among my people a hint from an elder was word enough. These white people just bossed you around directly and loudly, told you exactly what to do, and if you refused, dished out the punishment.

  I hated it. Who are these people, I said to myself, to tell me what to do with my life?

  So what did I do?

  I ran away. After I got the hang of it, I ran away every day. Figured out how to disappear between first roll call and last, didn’t go to class. At first they didn’t catch on—Indian children are always coming and going for various reasons. But the third or fourth time Mr. Banks saw me at meals, he got suspicious why he wasn’t seeing me in class. Must have gone upstairs, because Mr. King gave me a sharp talking to.

  I kept disappearing.

  Then they assigned an older boy to keep tabs on me. This was Emile, though we didn’t know each other yet. The
first day he policed me real good, and I had to stay in class. That night we had supper together and then stayed up late in his room talking in the dark. He was from Big Hollow Creek, even deeper into the Badlands than me, and was related to me on Grandpa’s side. Not close related. What you whites call cousins, we Indians call brothers and sisters. Emile was a cousin in our way.

  The next day Emile ran away with me.

  Those were great times. For a week Emile and I went out to the lake every day. We swam, we fished, we walked, we roamed, we caught crawfish below the outlet, and we made friends. He told me he was called to be a winkte, and what that meant. I told him how I was picked out to carry the old ways, but now I was also picked out to learn the white world, and I hated it. I even told him I feared it. In short, we became friends enough that twenty years later, when Emile saved my life on the C&NW tracks, it wasn’t the first time either of us saved each other’s lives.

  The next summer at a powwow Emile and I did the ceremony that made us hunka, brothers by choice. That lasts for life. Emile Gray Feather was the best thing I got out of Kyle Boarding and Day School.

  They caught on, of course. Whacked us with yardsticks and assigned other older boys to keep tabs on each of us.

  That worked on Emile, who dreaded being beaten and wanted only to be left alone with his colored pencils and paper.

  But when they beat me, I turned defiant. I kept running away. I dared them. As long as my days were free, I didn’t give a damn about the beatings.

  It was fun. I only needed a couple of minutes’ head start. I could get it when I went to the bathroom. Or when my guard went to the bathroom. Or I could come up with something so much fun that the guard would run off with me. Thomas Red Creek guarded me seriously for several days, but on Friday he hitchhiked all the way to Mount Rushmore with me. Though we didn’t have any money to get in, we figured the place was really ours—the whole Black Hills are really ours—and we slipped in through the woods. Then we climbed to the top of those big, funny heads and looked down George Washington’s nose at the tourists, just the way he looked down his nose at Indians.